[Colloq] **Hiring Talk** Monday, March 24, 149 CN

[Rachel Bates]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

presents
Jonathan Aldrich
Computer Science Department
University of Washington


  who will speak on:
Using Types to Enforce Architectural Design


Monday, March 24, 2003
10:30am
149 Cullinane Hall
Northeastern University



ABSTRACT
The architectural design of a software system can support analysis of
high-level properties and provide benefits for many software evolution
tasks.  However, existing tools decouple the architecture of a program from
its implementation, allowing inconsistencies to accumulate as the system
evolves.  Because of the potential for inconsistency, engineers evolving a
program cannot trust the architecture to accurately describe the properties
or structure of the implementation.

This talk presents a new approach: integrating architectural descriptions
into an implementation language, and using a type system to ensure that the
architecture is consistent with the code.  The approach is embodied in the
ArchJava language, which extends Java with features that declare the
software architecture and data sharing within a system.  ArchJava’s type
system enforces architectural conformance, the property that implementation
components communicate only in the ways specified by the architecture.
ArchJava is flexible enough to describe architectures that may change at run
time, and it supports many of the same coding styles and idioms that
programmers use in Java.  Several case studies applying ArchJava to existing
programs provide preliminary evidence that ArchJava is practical and can aid
software evolution tasks.

Host: Karl Lieberherr